Change In The Weather
by Syaoran no Miko
Summary: Mitsui ponders Tetsuo and a few other things on Christmas night. And Kogure, forget not Kogure. (yaoi)


Title: Change In The Weather  
Status: 1/1  
Author: Shi Lin (featherfur@hotmail.com)  
Genre: Yaoi  
Pairings: MitKo, slight mention of TetMit  
Rating/Warnings: PG-13, language  
Archive: SDficML, anywhere else as long as you ask first  
Disclaimers: Slam Dunk is (c) Inoue Takehiko and associates. This is a non-profit entertainment-only fanwork.   
  
Notes: See Micchi spazz. Spazz, Micchi, spazz. I blame reindeer 'flu. For Cindy-san - happy belated Xmas birthday! ^_^;;  
  
Change In The Weather  
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a slam dunk xmas fanfiction  
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It wasn't snowing.  
  
He leaned back against the red-bricked wall and looked up. The night sky was a dark satin sheet randomly gemmed with a few odd stars. A chill wind swirled round his uncovered face and hands in gusts of stinging coolness. The grey cement under his feet was damp and liberally covered with the muddy footprints of the people passing him; people striding, strolling, running, heading someplace else for warmth and dinner.  
  
But here in Kanagawa, on Christmas Day, it wasn't snowing.  
  
-Sign of the times, he thought. He'd heard some weird things about a "greenhouse effect" and "global warming" in class before. Whatever those were. The main thing was that the world was heating up and the poles were in danger of melting - and where would they be, he absently wondered, if half the planet was flooded? A small bit of dust tickled the inner corner of his eye and he blinked it out, shaking his head as he did so. Tetsuo and the rest would have been amazed - since when did he pay attention to lessons, anyway? Kogure was definitely getting to him.  
  
Tetsuo, in particular, would have smirked. Smirked his crooked, ironical smirk that came up whenever the subjects of school or basketball were alluded to, and called him a /student/, perhaps. It would have been like him. No matter whether student or sportsman, both were things that symbolised discipline and lawfulness. Both were things that Tetsuo had renounced a very long time ago.   
  
He adjusted his scarf against a stray draft of wind and wondered where Tetsuo was today. He didn't miss him - his current life was too full and too satisfying to miss anything of the former shell that had been his gangsterism days. But Tetsuo had been a *buddy*. Someone whose back you covered in a fight. Someone you drank with, bled with, even slept with every now and then. You could do all of those things with a buddy because both of you knew it wasn't anything serious. Both of you knew that commitment didn't figure on either side of the equation, and that was okay because it was *supposed* to be that way. /You need to fuck. I need to fuck. So we fuck, period./ Twice the pleasure and zero the headache as compared to women. Women were soft and fragrant and yielding, but they always wanted too much. One night in a bed and they wanted to be the centre of your life (and cash). Buddies never gave you any such trouble.  
  
They had been comfortable with each other, Tetsuo and himself, in their unsteady alliance of blood and violence. But it had gone no deeper than a physical plane, where the one thing certain was the fact that /Iwantyou and youwantme/. Body truth, they called it. The flesh, unlike the mind, never lied. But the flesh couldn't understand what the mind wanted, in the same way that Tetsuo couldn't understand how Mitsui had wanted to play basketball all through the year and a half of street brawling. That all through the numb days of hitting and being hit he'd been strangling the desire to return to the court, to feel the even coarseness of a ball under his hands. The fighting had been nothing more than an excuse to block out the yearning, to stay the itch that had threatened to overtake him those few times he'd passed the gym during basketball practice.  
  
Denial.   
  
He knew about denial.  
  
/...You came back./  
  
/I came back,/ he silently echoed. /and I stayed./ How much of that had been Anzai-sensei and how much Kogure, he didn't want to know. Ridiculous, that he should be thinking of this when he still had so much to catch up with skills-wise. Oh, he'd liked Kogure ever since their freshmen year - Kogure was a person anyone with sense *had* to like. You felt guilty otherwise, he was so pleasant and so kind. So much stronger than he looked. So *good*. He'd mentioned him to Tetsuo, once (why, he couldn't for the life of him remember). But Tetsuo had only smirked, looking at him with eyes that knew too much about things he had no idea of himself.   
  
-Mama's boy, he could hear the deep, smoky drawl commenting. -That one's a pansy, all right. Didn't know you went in for gardening, Micchan.   
  
-Shut up, he'd instantly retorted. -I don't grow flowers any more than you do, you prick. But when he'd thought about it, that hadn't been what he'd wanted to say. He'd been angry. Angry that Tetsuo had insulted *Kogure*, someone whom it should have been utterly impossible to insult. Someone whom he might never be able to look in the eye again. And Tetsuo had laughed, declining to say what he found so amusing.  
  
Mitsui Hisashi knew about denial.   
  
See also: cowardice.  
  
It had scared him shitless when he'd first seen Kogure again, that day he'd crashed the gym with his gundan. To actually come face-to-face with him, close enough to reach out and /don'tgothereshutthefuckUP/ - and he hadn't been able to control himself, so he'd just hung back and let reflexes take over. Lashing out at the attacker (wait, wasn't *he* the one attacking, now? but did it even matter?) was all he was capable of doing - it was Hobson's choice, in a nutshell. Punch Kogure or collapse screaming at his feet. Hell, he'd eventually ended up screaming at Anzai-sensei's feet anyway, but that wasn't the point.  
  
He'd *hurt* Kogure. He'd hurt *Kogure*. All because he hadn't had the guts to stop running. All because he hadn't had the fucking courage to admit he'd been fucking wrong about everything. Against his will, the image of gentle features through a blood-streaked haze flashed into his mind's eye - but it was obvious they weren't gentle anymore, twisted in shock and pain and outrage as they were.  
  
Had they been mirroring the same helplessness he'd been choking on, then?  
  
Had they been mirroring the look on his own face?  
  
A burst of neon fluorescence exploded in the shop entrance facing him. He squinted, half-throwing a hand up to shield his abused eyes. The entire shop was suddenly aglow with bright shimmering shades of yellow and red and green and orange, with some campy Japanese-translated carol squeaking tinnily over a set of speakers outside. He snorted, gladly taking the timely distraction as a way to end his darkening train of thought. Christmas, of course. He'd almost forgotten. Not that it would have been possible to forget, what with the garish lights and gaudy accessories that adorned so much of the street.   
  
Bah humbug. Hadn't some character in some English classic Kogure had been reading - Kogure was always reading when he had the time - said that? -The modern translation is 'bullshit', the bespectacled boy had told him, brown eyes twinkling. -Scrooge reminds me of you in a bad mood, somehow.  
  
He knew why he didn't like literature. All that flowery mess did nothing but complicate otherwise simple things. Bullshit was just bullshit, and that Screwge character could keep his senseless humbugs. Kogure could laugh - there was nothing wrong with being *economical*, no matter how many rich kids like Rukawa there were in the world. (At least, he assumed Rukawa was rich. Was *everything* he owned branded?)  
  
And -  
  
And someone was running towards him. He turned, already knowing who it was.  
  
"Mitsui!"  
  
He swallowed, holding up a hand. "Yo."  
  
"I got held up," Kogure apologised, smoothing back a thick shock of windblown hair. His pale face was flushed an attractive shade of light crimson. "How long have you been waiting?"  
  
He shrugged with studied nonchalance. "Don't mind. I don't know either."  
  
Kogure blinked, then laughed, that deep, quiet chuckle he always laughed when something amused him. "Just like Mitsui. Anything you want to do before dinner?"  
  
"Hm." He looked up thoughtfully. Dark eyes flicked to the awning above Kogure's head, widening as something small and white in a corner caught their attention.  
  
"Yes," he finally said.  
  
"What?"  
  
Heedless of the curious stares they were attracting, he put on hand on the other boy's shoulder. There was an odd sensation of moving through water as he leaned forward and brushed his mouth across Kogure's, the warm bow of flesh pliant and sweetly familiar under his own. Brown eyes were very soft when he pulled back, trying to say without words all he'd been thinking of just now - /I'm sorry, I'm so glad I came back this year.../  
  
A small, cold spot touched his hand. Then another. And another, little white flakes dancing down to earth from the night sky.   
  
It was snowing.  
  
"Merry Christmas," Kogure said, smiling gently. And he smiled back himself.   
  
"Let's go eat."  
  
Tetsuo, he hoped, was safely getting smashed in some seedy downtown bar. It was the least he deserved.  
  
Tetsuo, he hoped, was also having a Merry Christmas.   
  
  
= owari =  
  
afternotes: Shoddy goods, hooo boy. Don't tell me. *hides* Guess I screwed poor Micchan up big time. I'd probably have screwed him up a lot worse, but it's still the holiday season so Kogure got to kiss and make it better, thankfully. ^^; 


End file.
